Six-Core Analysis: AMD’s Phenom II X6 Gets Scaled Down

Benchmark Results: Power Consumption

System idle power doesn’t change too much if we disable individual cores. Roughly 15W to 20W are required by the graphics card, and the CPU drops power consumption anyway while idle.

Things are different under load. Every additional core adds to the overall peak power consumption. However, you can see that the added amount of power used with each additional core becomes smaller and smaller. This tells us that adding more cores should have a positive impact on performance per watt efficiency.